I hope I die before I get old (seriously, I don't want to go bald). How Pete Townshend cries every night.

The older generations scare me. They wear ties, enjoy horticulture and think that visiting English Heritage sites is an acceptable weekend activity (“oh wow, a pile of stones”). They refer to stereos as ghetto blasters, and in the case of my mother, seem to be on the verge of mainlining tea.

Nary a day goes by (except today, when I’ve managed to avoid almost all human contact) without someone telling me that when they were a lad(ess) they’d be playing innocently in the woods with their pals, frolicking with flocks of cartoon generated bluebirds and often breaking into spontaneous and impeccably choreographed song and dance. This person (if you can’t picture the scene, just imagine Harry Redknapp saying these things. I find him generally representative of this viewpoint in the same way Morgan Freeman is automatically given any wise person role in films) will then go on to bemoan the youth of today’s obsession with X-Stations, Popular Music and Jay-Zed.

What they don’t realise is that, just as they used to sneak out to go jiving with their favourite gal 50 years ago, so we hang around shopping centres and break into cars. It’s the nature of the cultural zeitgeist to generally move towards a more liberal viewpoint, such that I wouldn’t be surprised if in two generations teenagers are regularly creeping out of the house to film hardcore pornography in order to get at their parents. It’s just natural. Well, provided it’s het... (joke).

This was originally part of a much longer piece on the state of society today, until I realised that the first part completely nullified the second and vice versa, creating some kind of terrifying paradox stair loop and instantly putting my laptop in the same bracket as the Large Hadron Collider in the Risk of Destroying the World classifications, which range from Sackful of Kittens to Attila the Hun coming back as a Zombie with access to Nuclear Weapons.

Thanks for sticking with it, and if you’re lucky it’ll be another 5 months ‘til my next post.

P.S. If you haven’t got anything better to do at 10 tonight (you haven’t), then tune your televisual device into the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 4^th channel for The Wave, which promises to be a chilling reconstruction of a 1960’s social experiment gone wrong. I’ve never seen it, but from its Wikipedia page it sounds good.